Husserl’s Concept of Personhood and the Fichte Lectures

Abstract

In Husserl’s research manuscripts and later publications, the topic of personhood emerges as a consistent theme across Husserl’s writings. Although Husserl initially uses the term “person” in the ordinary, everyday sense of an individual in the world, he gradually begins to use the term in the transcendental register in order to describe the transcendental subject with its concrete, enworlded dimensions of subjectivity. These concrete dimensions, which include both the higher order dimensions of the ethical and intersubjective life of the transcendental subject, as well as the sedimented and affective dimensions such as worldliness and instinctive striving, all implicate the constitutive possibilities of the transcendental subject. Husserl thus seeks to develop an account of transcendental subjectivity that reflects this thickness and richness. This pregnant sense of transcendental subjectivity, which Husserl describes at various times as the “transcendental person” or the “monad,” is developed in Husserl’s research manuscripts beginning shortly after Husserl’s genetic phase and continuing through the remainder of his career.